IaaS Tops ODCA Member Cloud Usage Models

A survey of Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) members shows that the top cloud usage model is that of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), but members are also deploying other usage models.

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A survey of the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) membership found that the most popular usage model for members is infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which was noted by 86 percent of the respondents. It far outweighs any other category, including service orchestration (49 percent), virtual machine interoperability (48 percent), service catalog (39 percent) and scale-out storage (39 percent).

According to the ODCA, the survey highlights the continued growth in cloud computing adoption by the organization's members—not a far stretch considering part of the purpose of the ODCA is to push adoption of cloud computing models. But the ODCA goes even further, noting its members are ahead of broad market trends.

The data is restricted to a relatively small number of respondents. The ODCA collected information 124 members. Through the survey, it found that 31 percent of respondents are running at least 40 percent of IT operations in an internal cloud. But the ODCA expects that number to grow to 70 percent by 2016.

A big part of the survey was asking members about their adoption of the organization's cloud usage model requirements in requests for proposals (RFPs). According to the findings, 74 percent of respondents indicated they are already using or plan to use those requirements in RFPs in the next six months—up from 63 percent in the previous year's survey. ODCA usage models describe specific customer requirements that should be met to make cloud simpler, more secure and more efficient.

"With three-quarters of our members having made or planning to make purchases based on ODCA usage models, the Alliance is proving that unified requirements accelerate enterprise cloud adoption. The ODCA's work is clearly influencing enterprise adoption strategies as our members move more of their operations into the cloud," said Mario Mueller, ODCA chairman and vice president of IT infrastructure at BMW, in a prepared statement.

A few other highlights from the survey:

Fifty-two percent of respondents said they are proactively working to integrate cloud requirements into application development plans. Another 27 percent said they are actively discussing how to optimize apps for the cloud.

Two-thirds of members are interested in participating in proof-of-concept testing of solutions that adhere to ODCA usage model requirements.